


I Can Explain

by blackrose_juri



Series: Treacherous Saints [2]
Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Eye Trauma, Canon-Typical Violence, Frustration, Masturbation, Multi, Rough Sex, and (some) humor, lengthy confessional, multiple sex scenes (but not all explicit), orgasm ruined by existential crisis, pegging (mentioned), pyrrha pov, the questionable morality of Pyrrha's relationship with Wake while in Gideon's body
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-10 16:42:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 13,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28150341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackrose_juri/pseuds/blackrose_juri
Summary: Lyctorhood, from the perspective of a compartmentalized cavalier, is a strange beast. Sometimes, you surface in your necromancer's body under unexpected circumstances. Sometimes, you start an affair with your sworn enemy.And sometimes, despite all your efforts, you get caught.Pyrrha Dve has a myriad's worth of explaining to do.Pre-canon GtN. Standalone companion (but also a sequel) to "Rude Awakening."
Relationships: Gideon the First/Wake | Awake Remembrance of These Valiant Dead (sorta), Pyrrha Dve/Gideon the First, Pyrrha Dve/Wake | Awake Remembrance of These Valiant Dead
Series: Treacherous Saints [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2062203
Comments: 38
Kudos: 32





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hello all! This fic has been stewing in my drafts for quite some time now, and I am beyond excited to finally share it.
> 
> Although it's not necessary, if you'd like to read the original jam fic that inspired this one, you can find it here: [Rude Awakening](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26698270) [Summary: _Gideon the First keeps waking up in the strangest of places, flung out of space and time. He makes it his duty to find out why_ ]. Warning for tonal whiplash if you do read it; that fic is borderline crack, and this follow-up fic is much darker and hornier (but with a few funny bits sprinkled in, I promise). 
> 
> Either way, Pyrrha is here to take you on a journey. 
> 
> Many thanks to discord friends for the long Pyrrwakeon chats, and for tolerating my endless, vague references to "my wip," and special thanks to my lovely beta reader and enabler, [gallpall](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gallpall/pseuds/gallpall).
> 
> Hope you enjoy!

Gideon.

Gideon the First,

Gideon Twain,

 _my_ Gideon.

Gideon, my darling, baby, dutiful necromancer dearest—

I can explain.

I suppose I should start by apologizing, so:

I’m sorry, darling. I overstepped. I stole from you. I used your body to fuck our sworn enemy, and I regret all of it.

… most of it.

There is a myriad-long story attached to the situation in which you— _we_ —find ourselves, and I owe it to you twofold to tell it. I’m not sure if, in its aftermath, another myriad’s worth of penitence would justify my actions, and if that were the case, I would understand.

I am at your mercy.

But I also have a bone to pick with you, sweetheart.

I’m well aware that an apology followed by a “but” is in poor taste, but I can assure you the bone is a bone of love. You know how I am. 

Besides, you won’t hear any of this yet. As I sink once more into the reddish muck of your spirit, so artfully parried by you, I only wish to draft what I might tell you when we reunite across the River, that I might revise it in the interim.

You’ll have to bear with me if I fumble.

Let’s begin with something positive, shall we?

I love you, Gideon Twain, with every bit of the fire in me.

We grew up together, in those early days. Flailed together, adults-made-children by the Resurrection. We fought together, and we fought each other, both of us headstrong and iron-skinned in different configurations. You were my anchor, and I set you free. I loved the way we clashed, and I loved the way we fit together—you and I, saints of duty before we’d ever been named as such, willing to burn for the cause until our flames licked us up.

We toiled side-by-side in that house, sometimes until we tired of one another. You were the sole scholar to keep pace with your cavalier, and out of respect for you, I kept pace with your theorems. You honed your body; I honed my mind. One flesh, one end. You were never one to gloat, but you knew damn well that we embodied those words better than any of the others, our brothers and sisters so dysfunctional.

You remember our agreement back then, don’t you? I told you I wouldn’t give you my soul unless you could kick my ass, and you took that challenge with a fearless smile.

In the end, you never could, but you sure as hell came close.

I devised our trial in concept, that we might fight as one, and you gave it shape. I was the first to let you look inside me, double entendre intended. Together, we strengthened our link and became true counterparts. Our union would be one without sacrifice: all of me in you and none of me lost.

But physique wasn’t the only component of our agreement, Gideon Twain. There were matters of personality to account for. Matters of desire.

You were always so … straightlaced.

I was not.

I hunted lovers for sport, tore through bedrooms like a hurricane. You were going to take my soul and leave my body a corpse, and I was not going to live for an eternity inside a sexless prison.

Giddy, I remember … I was so hesitant to suggest … I was so self-conscious thinking you’d feel pressured to—

But you flung yourself at me so _eagerly_ , and I understood you, then, that your reservations were not for lack of desire, but because you were so afraid to let yourself tremble and be wanted, lest it distract you from your work. Had I been a wiser woman, I would have approached the situation differently; I would have cradled your heart instead of treating your repression like a broken toy that I could fix.

We both would pay the price for that lack of foresight.

Nevertheless, we stumbled through conversations about boundaries like naïve teens, thinking we could solve for several myriads’ worth of hypotheticals. Though we were foolish, we had fun working out the kinks, didn’t we? Sneaking around in training rooms and storage closets and basement labs? John always fussed over the broken furniture, but you were an impenetrable alibi; he’d blame Cyrus or Ulysses every time, without fault, before he’d ever suspect _you_.

I hope I’m not alone in saying I cherished those days up until the final hour, when it was time for me to be consumed by you. We left Canaan behind as one body, two souls—you with the taste of my blood on your tongue as you kissed me for the last time—and we never returned.

We’d completed our first service as the Emperor’s saints.

Now, this is where the loving bone comes into play: 

We need to talk about duty.

As a young Lyctor, you were so dedicated to your work—to John’s work—that it devoured you from the inside. I was the same way, back then, watching from behind your eyes, within your viscous ocean.

Single-handed and long-suffering, you tamed that red planet, coaxed fields of green from its dust, and raised up thousands upon thousands of fresh-blooded soldiers. I would’ve let them have a bit more fun, myself, but you did a fine job. You assigned the Cohort its flag—red for the tint of the soil, red for the blood to be shed, red for the color of my hair. Our force was unstoppable, self-sufficient, rhizomatic in its expansion, and we smiled upon it in silence, proud.

In the centuries that followed, I admired your tireless hands as you saw to the safe haven’s construction. You worked yourself raw, determined to protect our motley crew. We lost countless days to the River, those years, my hands at your reins as Heralds swarmed, and I honored you with the body you’d built for me, careful to keep you intact. Over and over, I fought and evaded, and in the moments of respite, you assembled our home.

This was, perhaps, your most pivotal achievement (and yes, I am aware of your attachment to that silly Sixth House spat) because the Mithraeum would unravel you, thread by thread.

Life stagnated in those halls, grew dreary and tepid. Neither of us had anticipated the amount of waiting involved in sainthood, and your blood ran cold, insulated from battle. We were not meant to wait, you and I; we were meant to hunt, to engage, to _do_.

You and I had always differed, however, in our methods of coping with inactivity. I’d tried, in our youth, to impress that part of me upon you, but you chucked my advice directly out of your airlock.

Think, Gideon, about the eons’ worth of sordid relationships between our brethren. Every single affair lacked staying power, but that doesn’t mean they lacked purpose. Cytherea and Augustine and Mercymorn and Cyrus and Ulysses and God Himself; they flung themselves at one another in a plethora of combinations. They kissed, conspired, argued, fucked, and to what effect?

_They kept themselves interested in life, Gideon._

You, on the other hand, waited, listless and desperate like a stray puppy for John’s caprice to point in your direction. You itched to run errands, to play fetch, because you conflated duty with purpose. You would have surfaced halfway across the universe through the River just to scratch the backs of his shoulders.

I’ll be the first to admit there was a time I would have done the same, but I spent year after vacant year inside your sepulchral mind as you refused yourself every instance of interest directed your way, every pang of hunger that gripped you, and my attitudes towards duty changed.

You skipped out on every party. You resigned yourself to maintenance work, instead, and it never made you happy. You lived vicariously through the residue of festivities, reaped none of the benefits, and I suffered, twice-removed, through you.

Same as it was back at Canaan, it wasn’t for lack of desire that you did this; Cassiopeia made eyes at you on more than one occasion, and I know you wanted her because I _live in your body_ , yet some ridiculous voice in your head had convinced you that you would be a failure if you let yourself want.

And I’m sorry, darling, to be so caustic with you, but you would know the same anger, too, if you were forced to watch the person for whom you’d sacrificed your life cut themself off from happiness. I ached to tell you that you’d honor me best by letting yourself love, even in my absence.

By letting yourself _be_ loved.

If only I had been able to articulate that when we were younger.

Perhaps if I hadn’t been so focused on sex, you would have listened.

That was my failure, love, not yours.

I’m sorry.

(But goodness, Giddy, I’m a woman with _needs_.

The promise was “one flesh, one end.”

We were getting neither _flesh_ , nor _end_ , and quite frankly, it was making us both go mad.)


	2. Chapter 2

Lyctorhood is a strange beast, isn’t it?

I can only imagine what it’s like from the necromancer’s perspective, to be charged by a friend, a sibling, a lover, roiling inside you, a universe away.

You’ll have to describe it to me, someday, to sate my curiosity.

I’ll tell you my experience, as your cavalier:

When I first surfaced in you, I panicked. My memory was unclear, save for the sharp bite of the rapier in my heart and the bloody plunge into the River. I died in you, again and again, drowned in the substance that comprises your spirit. Thanergy and thalergy as potent, adamant oceans; intervals of time as indistinguishable pools.

I was certain that we’d failed. That we’d leapt too soon.

How could either of us have known what to expect, though? We were among the first Lyctors. Was I doomed for eternity to repeat the same cycle? To choke on you, to sink deep, to stubbornly emerge? Or was I intended to escape into some other pocket of your conscience until you summoned my power?

Turns out the solution was to do nothing at all.

I had no body, no mouth, no lungs; how could I possibly drown?

I had to learn to be a ghost.

At first, it seemed like a joke. Lucidity and sensation waxed, but rarely past the extent of cheap imitation. I received echoes from your nervous system, sifted for the details lost in translation, and oblivious, you teased me with every movement and every touch. Solely in the River did I feel solid, and I clung to those violent, fleeting moments, scrambled for the haptic scraps you sent my way.

Your thoughts, on the other hand, appeared crystalline before me. I read them like braille to sharpen my vision through your eyes. You whispered monologues in my ears, beamed me your emotions, and whenever you thought of me, you tugged.

An invisible, umbilical link tethered me to you, and you yanked it for comfort. The first decades after Canaan House were torturous; you jerked me nonstop as you grieved, even in the midst of your Cohort work. I reached for you in return, but our line of contact bent to your will alone.

As ages passed, you thought of me less, wholly engrossed in the Emperor’s missions. You stored the memory of me in my eyes, instead, and communed with me in front of mirrors. I cheered for you on the other side with the hope that you’d develop a healthy relationship with my loss.

We both know that never happened.

The meaningful tasks dried up, our siblings lost their lives, and you regressed, became obsessive in the absence of stimulation. You yearned for me fiercely, and I, in my frustration, grew hypersensitive, wracked by impulses for which I had no outlet.

And one night, you dragged me up to your surface.

I don’t know which one of us was to blame, Giddy.

I don’t know if it was your repression or my appetite.

I don’t know whether it was a byproduct of our geriatric Lyctorhood or some form of necromantic erectile dysfunction, but Gideon, the first time I emerged in your body outside of the River, you were hard.

Stiff.

Apparently, life hadn’t yet exhausted its wares.

For the record, this is the part of the story I don’t regret.

I was slower than usual to realize I’d taken control, as it hadn’t been my intention. I witnessed you, not for the first time, meditate on my image and unbuckle your belt, and I held onto our chain, high on secondhand desire. Eyes shut, we breathed in tandem, in and out—you, in quiet resignation, and I, in disembodied need—and somewhere in the rhythm, we switched.

The rush of your air, the wall against your back, the tension in your shoulders—

You’d frozen, and I’d inherited your unfiltered expectation. I looked down at your forearms, at your hands, at your thumbs hooked over your waistband. They finished their journey at my suggestion.

I couldn’t have pretended to be shy with you if I tried. I saw one reasonable course of action, and as your faithful cavalier, I took it. Consider it delayed reciprocation, if you’d like; we’d done this before, the other way ‘round.

What a cruel, kind luxury, to touch you and be touched by you. To sigh on your behalf. Gideon, I’d missed you for eons. I savored your body for the both of us, accounted for our lost time in slow, tender strokes. I traced your sharp facets of muscle, kissed your battle-scarred arms, ran your fingers down your cheek, your neck, your chest; and you, Gideon, brought me to your knees, weak to your sensation, vulnerable to the memory of us.

Which one of us was it, who curled over, desperate, and braced against the ground, who pitched your hips into your hand and longed for my body in its place? Our outlines blurred at the edge of release, and in the midst of our shared fantasy, I called your name.

Those three syllables—aberrant, scandalous, and tragic in your timbre—pushed us over, and as one, we trembled, euphoric, a botched facsimile of a couple.

We danced like this on countless occasions over the next few years—not by my choice, but not to my dismay, either. Part of me puzzled over what’d caused our game of tag, but the circumstances were harmless enough that I cast aside the worry. You hardly noticed the exchanges, yourself, as a result of the time constriction. You’d resurface on the other end of each haze with the mess I’d made, nerves alight and energy spent, and your satisfied mind would fill in the gaps before it raised the questions.

And honestly, Giddy, on my end, I was beyond elated to be solid. To do something normal _. Normal_ , relative to killing Heralds and dodging sheets of dead flesh. Finally, after countless lifetimes spent as the silent witness to your pain, I could do something for you. I could make you feel good. Cherished. Happy.

I soured that spoonful of honey, soon enough.

I should have been content. I should have been grateful. I’d regained my contact with you—indirect, but concrete nonetheless—and I should have counted that among my blessings.

Instead, I was greedy.

When I touched you, I remembered what it meant to physically hunger.

 _Remembrance_ was what I’d underestimated—the keystone of deprivation.

Prior to our rendezvous, my craving for a body had been little more than pink-tinted nostalgia, fuzzed-out by distance, but after I’d rediscovered the depths of tactile pleasure, my patience for dispossession grew thin.

So many indulgences I’d taken for granted—

The cacophonous tang of sweat and scotch and smoke that clung to our lips on those restless nights; the elegant ridges of jaws and collarbones beneath eager fingertips and grazed by teeth; the echo of laughter in a metal room, cut short by groans and sighs; they flooded back in technicolor, and I wanted them with fervor. I wanted to kiss, to bite, to claw, to fuck, and I used you as my toy, wrung out of you whatever paltry gratification I could find.

I let myself become addicted to you.

In turn, my addiction bred experiment and action. I discovered a way to climb our link, to pull you under and steer you at will. The theorem was embarrassingly simple, compared to our achievements thus far, yet not once had I probed those wavelengths. In hindsight, it was probably for the best that I hadn’t solved it earlier, when we were surrounded by throngs of warm bodies.

Hesitant to push my luck, I honed and mastered the spell while you slept. I woke you in the middle of the night, first for minutes at a time, and practiced gently transferring control to keep you undisturbed. I worked my way up to an hour; an hour was the longest your unconscious mind would withhold its suspicions.

I know it’s awful. I’m sorry. Those nights, I robbed you and worshipped you all the same.

Still, it wasn’t always about sex. Sometimes, I only sat in front of your mirror and beheld you in the artificial light, intact, with your eyes in your face. Sometimes, I retraced the scars you’d accumulated before we’d merged and reminisced. Other times, I wrapped your arms around your torso and clung to your warmth, imagined your embrace.

And each night I spent in you, I felt whole.

I won’t ask you to forgive me for this, Gideon. If I had stopped there, it’s unlikely I’d have apologized at all; we’d faced far worse atrocities than a few sad handjobs. I only need you to understand that this was the foundation for our subsequent downfall. We would both find ourselves on the cusp of treachery as our myriad hurtled to its end, but it was my perversion that would finish us. 


	3. Chapter 3

Ten thousand years, Giddy.

We’d lived for ten thousand years before we developed a good and proper lady problem.

To be precise, it’d been 9,959 years, but what’s a few decades to someone our age?

And what was left to be done? To be seen? We’d crushed uprisings, fought the souls of planets, and twiddled our thumbs in the name of duty. We’d lurked around corners and acquired strange habits to smother the tedium. We were old, we were tired, and we were bored.

Then John sent you after _her_ , and everything changed.

Oh, how she lit a fire in you. In us.

As surely as she’d resurrected that vengeful faction, she breathed life back into our stale existence. She was so young, so human, so mortal, yet she fought us like a furious revenant, as if death itself were beneath her. And for once, she wasn’t a horrific creature to cleave apart in the River. No, no—she was gorgeous. She was radiant. She was brown-skinned and red-haired and dark-eyed and hewn rough, like granite carved by a militant chisel.

I’ll tell you this: it wasn’t my hand that made a fool of us, not at the start; her cunning and elusiveness were entirely her own. You tracked her, scoured over her faint trails, and I watched, eager for the day you’d pin her down. I longed to be at your side during those first attempts, to guide your hands as we set snares together. Piece by piece, you deciphered her patterns and trajectories, and our distance from her dwindled.

I’d gleaned details that you’d missed about her, though.

There’s a heady thrill, for us hunters, that comes with the territory of an even match. The need to chase, to corner, to grasp, if left unchecked, teeters on the edge of obsession and lust. Pour enough energy into a rival and one day, you might find it easier to bed them than to snuff them out and let them go.

She and I were both familiar with that delicate line and not at all shy.

You were in denial, but you walked it, nonetheless.

Wake telegraphed the evidence in her eyes.

The first time we fought her in close combat, we’d already spent months at her heels—winter on a settled planet, under the cover of night. Despite the cold, your blood boiled as you silenced the guards and snuck into her quarters.

Ready for you on the other side of her bedroom door, she brandished a smile as sleek as the shotgun leveled at your chest. “Thought you’d never make your move,” she said, and she pumped the forend and shot you.

You staggered. She lunged.

Lovely surprise; you could shield against the bullets, but you couldn’t cancel gravity.

In the struggle for the gun, she showed you the limits of her muscle, legs cinched around your waist and arms strained above you. You helpless man, you dawdled in that moment longer than necessary, relished the labored breaths and intermittent grunts that cut the silence. How many ages had it been since you’d witnessed such audacity? Since you’d been held in such an intimate tangle? Your heart raced for her with dangerous enjoyment.

Lest you be forced to confront it, you twisted at the hip and pulled her under you, pushed the long rib of the shotgun into her throat. She slackened and relinquished the weapon, but you were too distracted by her sweat-slick brow to catch her hand as it fumbled with the holsters at her belt.

A detonator. A toy. An insult—your defeat so small in her palm, held up next to her face. You eased off her neck and grew deathly still.

“Whole place is rigged,” she rasped, and she teased the button with her thumb. “Enough to kill us both. Small price to pay for a world with one less wizard.”

You understood the gravity and the hatred in her voice, but what you chose not to probe was that stare. The challenge in it. The confidence. That was not the stare of a woman making a last-ditch effort to inflict a wound, but that of one testing her opponent for reciprocal mischief.

She must have known our sliver of leverage, that there was no guarantee we’d die in the blast and that the same could not be said for her. You could have twisted that arm, launched another battle to reject her petty stalemate, but you didn’t. You played it safe. You stood and walked away, and in the process, you placed her greatest weapon directly into her hands: the knowledge that you’d grown attached, that you couldn’t part with her under such imperfect circumstances.

Make no mistake—I don’t blame you for your choice. I wouldn’t have done anything less incriminating, and, in fact, the next time we faced her, I did something far worse. You and I were compromised together, both of us loath to allow those months of adrenaline to end.

I never tried to rationalize that weakness, but you did.

You still had your dignity to preserve.

That same night, in the safety of your temporary shuttle bed, you thought of her and convinced yourself you were thinking of me.

Reasonable enough, as far as stories go. She reminded me of my younger self, too.

I saw through you, anyway; you didn’t tug as hard this time.

What would you have done if you were aware of my presence? Would you have shared your desire for her with me? Would you have thrown yourself headfirst into sin with me at your side, your accomplice to whisper temptations into your ear?

I’d grown so accustomed to handling pleasure in your stead that I’d almost forgotten your shy proclivities. How you closed your eyes, placed your hand over your heart, and dug your fingers into your chest; how you held your lips together tight and stifled your pleas, as if the vast expanse of space itself would blush to hear you moan. Depleted of your reticence, you surrendered yourself to your hand, to your animal instinct, to that low, lone growl, and—

—I slid into you, shameless, and blurred our lines again, stole the languid blanket of your afterglow.

She was _our_ crime, _our_ vice, _our_ end, and I longed for the clutch of our guilt around my throat. I’d shoulder it for you, this time.

I placed you on your back, head against your pillow. I worked your slick fingers around your sensitive tip, jerked at the electric kick of your overworked nerves. If you wouldn’t do it, I would; I imagined you with her, and me with her, and you and me with her, and I wound you up and spun you out all over again.

I blasphemed God in our name, and with your lips, I smiled.

Two months later, we faced her in the wet mire of a jungle on old, abandoned Edenite territory. She weaved through the marsh at a breakneck pace, a solitary red streak, relentless as she tore through the brambles with bare, lacerated arms. You gave chase and forced her path towards the cliff in the distance, the rapid squelch of your footsteps drowned between the rain and the waterfall’s roar.

After our heated night, you’d considered your stray impulse exorcised and carried on in denial, pushed the ache down deep until a blistering clarity took your mind.

You thought you might kill her.

Why, then, did your heart lurch as she reached the edge and leapt? What was that pang, Gideon?

She hadn’t even hesitated, but you barreled through the brush and craned your neck to find her in the turbulence of the lake below. A pinprick splash betrayed her position; she shot up from the murky surface—head, shoulders, and persistent limbs—and dragged herself to the bank along the current. Wounded and graceless, she scrambled to her feet and spun to regain her balance.

You left your questions unanswered; you pointed, reared back, cast forward. I remain unconvinced by your aim, but your spear found purchase in her side and knocked her onto her back.

She couldn’t escape. She wouldn’t recover. Perhaps you _would_ kill her this time. Brow set hard, you launched yourself from the precipice, arms crossed over your chest and legs extended straight, plunged into the water like a missile, and—

— _and_ , Gideon, I made a choice.

I left you submerged, and I swam to shore for her. I couldn’t let you resign us to our next listless myriad, not yet.

To hell with John. To hell with duty. Fire was our master, and Wake our precious kindling.

I pressed your boot into her stomach, held her firm against the sodden earth, and gripped the shaft of the spear. Obstinate to the grave, she thrashed and spat until she looked at us long enough to notice the change in our face. Poor, fragile thing, thoroughly soaked and laden with mud and broken, just like us; her eyes softened the slightest bit, eased by a cocktail of disgust and resignation. If we had intended to kill her, she would have already been dead.

She stilled, wrapped her unsteady fingers around the blood-soaked wood, and nodded.

I pulled.

She bucked, knees bent and shoulders forward, hips immobile under your heel. Though she made a valiant effort to bite it back, she groaned and swore an oath, teeth tinted red and bared. She flattened her palm against the wound, and I knelt at her side, pushed her down by her collar, refused her the chance to resist as I reached under her shirt, under her hand.

Warm, tender viscera; I thumbed the tattered flesh and made a silent calculation.

She trembled, yet she surfaced that lustrous stare for me, managed that crooked smile, and curled her weak fingers over your wrist. “You sorry excuse for an assassin.” She offered a pathetic squeeze, the last of her strength. “Got a crush on me, don’t you?”

Unbelievable, Giddy.

“You’re smiling,” she said.

Who else, but her?

I pressed into her gash as reprimand and confirmation, and she, with her near-death delirium and infinite spirit, _laughed_ through the pain, if her string of coughs and stuttered breaths could be considered as such. I shared her sick mirth as a kindred spirit. 

“You’ll have to forgive my partner, Commander.” How strange to hear my cadence in the gravel of your voice, criticizing you to another. “He’s been indecisive lately.”

She licked the blood from her split lip, and her grip faltered, skin slippery with rain and muck. “Don’t think for a second that I’ll hold back next time.”

“Promise me you won’t,” I said, and she fired at me with her softest judgement:

“You’re a freak.”

“Aren’t we all?”

Beneath me, she fought to keep her eyelids apart and teetered on the edge of consciousness. I held her gaze, brushed the muddy tangles of hair from her forehead, and cradled the side of her face. Whether by instinct or desire, she turned into the meager warmth of your hand, and all I could think was _if only, if only_ —

As she drifted, I set our sin in stone.

Torn side to scraped arms to busted lip, I called her flesh to knit together with a lover’s touch. I read the rhythm of her pulse, mapped her thanergetic signature, and mended her broken body—ten thousand years of shared power, bent to my will, passed as a cipher to our cherished enemy.

In your arms, I carried her—limp, delicate, and alive—to her shuttle, and I told myself it wasn’t her that I’d rescued.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw: eye trauma

She kept her promise, as it turned out, the next time we met.

Not a single punch pulled.

The ambush.

We should have expected an offensive from her, sooner or later, but we’d grown comfortable, a pair of lazy predators with our backs turned.

I wonder if she chose the location for nostalgia’s sake: as lush as the jungle, soft ground underfoot, easy to lose the path in the vibrance of the landscape. The peace was new, however: the sky was clear and the wind cool and the air silent, save for animal chatter. Lovely spot for a picnic, or for a burial ground, if that distinction still exists for us.

Wistful, you searched for her forest camp the old-fashioned way, and you puzzled over the gap in your memory while I reminisced on physical contact.

We should have checked the trees.

Only in hindsight can I appreciate her attack. In the moment, she was … terrifying. If not for the rustled leaves, she would’ve had us; we were saved by a matter of mere milliseconds. Decisive, she dropped from above and latched onto your back. To her advantage, it took all your concentration not to buckle, and while you struggled to keep upright, she hooked an arm around you, one sharp arc to plunge her knife into your heart.

She howled malice in your ear, and your vision redshifted.

A miss. Too far left, but by a narrow margin.

A crimson spray; the weapon wrenched out of your distressed flesh—

She aimed again, and you grasped for something, _anything_ —the handle, a limb, her hair spilt over your shoulder. Instinct saved you, but to gruesome effect. The meat of your palm buffered the strike as it landed under your collar, blade through hand through muscle.

Little more than grunts from you, Gideon, but I knew, I knew—

It was simpler past the initial shock. We outmatched her in brute strength. All we needed was renewed calm. Grab the wrist and halt the vicious jerking, pull it out fast and throw her forward. You were almost there, centimeters away—

—but she released.

I’m so sorry, Giddy.

I’d never witnessed you in such agony. You … you didn’t scream, somehow, but you sent me every second of that awful incantation when she—

( _—end me, end me, end me, end m—_ )

—your eyes, Gideon, she gouged out your eyes. The eyes you valued as mine.

_I_ did that to you.

I rescued your demise in her.

I deserved your place at her feet, on my knees, hunched over in wild anguish, bleeding and yearning for exit.

So, for us both, I took it. Your relief, my punishment.

Cold steel chilled the bridge of your nose, and a few feet above me, a lighter clicked and sparked.

I’d always idealized, as a young zealot, a death like this, face at the tip of an opponent’s pistol. I’d imagined myself shoulders-high, armed with clever remark and cocksure eloquence, but in the heat of the moment, I knelt there, blind, listened to her long, steady exhalation, and panicked.

Chin pointed up and punctured hand to her wrist, I begged for her like a hurt animal—not to be spared, but to be comforted and euthanized. For her, this once, I’d be pathetic. She’d earned it.

One self-indulgent favor was all I’d wanted.

I hadn’t asked for the dropped gun or the torn shirt tied over your ruined sockets; hadn’t asked for the calloused fingers splayed across your cheek or the possessive thumb brushed over your mouth. I hadn’t asked with the expectation that she’d grant my deathbed request at all, but she did.

She did.

She kissed me, bloody and brazen and merciless, lips to lips and tongue to tongue. I tasted her anger on the tail end of copper, salt, and smoke and whimpered my desperation as thanks. That kiss would be my final word, vulgar and violent, spoken through stolen breaths to prove I hadn’t damned us without reward.

Her teeth grazed your lip; once, twice, and again. I clawed for her belt—she’d crouched—and tugged her closer for more. Desire crept from your gut like gluttonous ivy, and I offered it our torment, let it plug our wounds; I lost the orbital sting to its slow heat and clung for as long as she allowed.

Separation should have come, but she lingered at your lips, your chin, your jaw, and I understood her as wholly as I understood you and me—

 _Not yet_.

All this pain, only to end in indecision.

Was this charity or spite? Revenge or confession?

She shaped her answer against your ear: “I repay my debts, lich.”

By way of farewell, her heavy knuckles slammed into your jaw, and I swallowed a mouthful of earth in the collision that followed. I croaked my name at her in my disoriented bliss, an afterthought.

She didn’t respond. 

Perhaps she’d already left. 


	5. Chapter 5

Reckless fools, the three of us.

We’d fractured ourselves and one another in the same swing. Now that I’ve taken you this far, I’ve no doubt in your ability to imagine the subsequent wreck, but I’m no fan of unfinished stories, as you know.

She’ll tell you her third of it, I’m sure, provided you don’t strangle each other first, but use this interlude to brace yourself, if you must, because you deserve my honesty, and you deserve to know the details.

Two decades, between our fairytale first kiss and the moment you caught me in the act. As expected of us, we followed divergent paths to the same destination, servants to our own gravity and satellites of hers.

You set yourself to a secondary task: to find the source of your lost memory and crush it.

Consider that mission accomplished. What becomes of me as a result is anyone’s guess, but hide and seek never ended without a mess for us, did it?

On my end, I resigned myself to permanent insurgence. I made it my charge to keep her alive. I allowed you to fight her, to best her, to flirt with triumph, but I intervened in her favor, and I bound your hands to set her free.

If I’m being truthful, Gid, I often enjoyed it. You were confused, but at least you were engaged, lit from within. With that mote of collateral benevolence, I could divert the guilt as needed and seize corporeality under her touch. Or, if it pleased me, I could revel in the shame, both mine and yours, and slake my thirst for flagellation.

Our Commander Wake.

She made it as easy to resent you as it was to love you, and I oscillated between poles, a different ache in my heart with every emergence. She came to know me by your dark eyes and my dexterity, by my rhythm in your voice. She expected me, signaled to me while you wrestled, and I surfaced for her each time, devout and newly religious.

To be blunt—I fucked her when you fought her: in the bunker, at the station, on her ship. We used you as foreplay; I conquered her in your stead. There were other instances in the years of fruitless peace talks between wars, and those were less conspicuous, less disruptive, but equally depraved, if not worse.

I regret my actions, of course, inasmuch as they’ve caused you grief—petty resentment aside, I broke our promise, in my weakness—but I can’t say I wouldn’t throw myself at her all over again if I had my own body to spare. Perhaps in another universe, we could have shared these stories with tangled fingers and hushed laughter, relived the artificial youth of our Canaan days.

This was not that other universe, and your body was not mine to spare, but I spent it anyway. 


	6. Chapter 6

You remember the outpost chase, don’t you?

The heat, the sweat, the dust kicked up by your boots? The sand caked with the viscera of slain Cohort traitors, brought to justice by your hand?

 _Integrity_ weighed heavily on your mind that day as descendants of our House turned against you, and you followed her with a question, needed to know if she was worth your respect. You seethed to think she’d cursed you. What a disappointment it’d be, to find your favorite zealot a hypocrite.

The irony would’ve choked me if I had a throat.

She wore Cohort colors as she led you, shot full of holes and oblivious to her silent flirtation, deep into the gut of the bunker. She chose a fine setting to smoke me out, too; she coaxed us into that narrow supply room in the midst of the scuffle and forced you to abandon the sword as she slipped past its range. Your only option was to touch her, grapple her, wet your fists with her sweat.

Bold move on her part.

You know me, though, Giddy, never so easily impressed. She would have to wait for me and taste defeat before I entertained her whim.

I stoked my excitement as voyeur to your dance, relished the tension as you caught her wrist and wrenched it high and closed the match with style; you barreled into her with your shoulder, knocked her backwards into the overstocked shelves, and left her in a pile of toppled crates and scattered rations. By the time she scrambled to her feet, you’d retrieved your rapier, pressed its long edge under her chin, and lifted.

You spoke your piece, asked her if she’d been the one to steal your memory, and she scoffed at you, voice strained against the blade but no less caustic. She told you to ask amongst your own.

Sound advice, although I’m sure she hadn’t considered you’d take it.

Lest the implications sour your success, you saved the worry for later, and you offered her your final act of respect.

( _Commander Awake Remembrance of These Valiant Dead—_ )

Understated sentimentality, your most adorable trademark.

(— _Kia Hua Ko Te Pai_ —)

I know how thoroughly it gripped you to say that name. The warmth of your victory, undercut by genuine sorrow; the eloquence of those initial words, followed by sharp, stinging absurdity—

(— _Snap Back to Reality Oops There Goes Gravity_.)

You spoke her name like a somber, broken poem—beautiful, yet stupid, so wonderfully imperfect—and as she stood there, bathed in the flickering vermillion of the warning lights, chest heaving and neck angled away from your blade, eyes on ours with an expectance that bordered doubt, I longed to taste that name on your tongue. She’d waited long enough, and so had I.

I could have framed the image of her recognition—the betrayal of relief in the quiver of her brow, the fraction by which her shoulders relaxed and re-tensed, as if she’d deemed me worthy of some other distinct flavor of unease. She masked both fear and gratitude with a sly, derisive proposition, but I’d already committed. I dropped the sword.

Gideon … your hands were _my_ hands, right then, as I drew her to me, palm flush against the small of her back; it was _my_ thumb, along the ridge of her jaw, pressed into the scrape she’d acquired in her collision, one of many parting gifts from you. She returned a gesture in kind and dug her rough fingertips into the sore, bullet-checked field of your chest, of your stomach, and I allowed her to hurt me as she pleased, tensed with your muscles at her provocation.

Lips parted, she ventured closer and, with dry satisfaction, taunted me for my candid desire, same as she had those months ago. Must have been an awkward sight, my smile on the stoic canvas of your face.

I told her to kiss it off me.

She struck me, first, open palm to your cheek—a compliment, really—before she grabbed me by a fistful of your shirt and crushed our lips together. Perhaps she knew that I, in retaliation, would slam her up against the metal shelves and strangle her deep groan with your hand to her throat and your tongue in her mouth. Perhaps she’d guessed that if she sought blood with her teeth to your lower lip, I’d grip her by her hair and wrest sideways, turn her head to suck my mark into her neck.

Certainly, if she intended to probe my habits, I’d reveal them to her; I pushed your knee between her thighs, pulled her by her belt, and ground against her, would have lost myself in your body if not for the hand curled over the stiff curve of your cock on the other side of layers of fabric. Sorrow, amusement, and acute pity, fuel for our rhythm; we both raced to unzip, to untuck, to claw at flesh.

If I’d thought of you then, I might’ve stopped her when she backed me into the wall of wooden boxes and lowered herself by our sad heap of clothes on the floor, but instead, I held those thick, red waves back from her forehead, leaned your hips forward, and for that moment, Gideon, you were … tertiary. She counted that amongst her triumphs.

Sorry to say, the sordidness of it only rendered me further helpless. She drew my aberrant voice from your throat with wet lips on skin, and soon enough, she saw me undone; she took you with her mouth, and I, with your fist clenched in her hair, showed her a rapid, ceaseless pace.

She endured, no less than you’d expect.

As I shuddered, she spat you out with vitriol and haste and wiped you away, remembered who we were and what we weren’t. My fault for the lack of warning. I apologized in the language I knew best, wordless; I joined her on her knees, cupped her chin, and licked the taste of you from her lips. What better way to recall how fiercely I missed you, than to taste the two of you, at once, and remain insatiate?

Hands at your nape and at your wrist, she beckoned me onto her, my willful prey, warm body against the cold tile, eyes dark and strong legs hooked around me, and I set tongue and teeth to her freckled collar and offered her the writhing release she needed.

She swore her praise with gritted reticence, and I kept her under me until disdain reclaimed the arousal, until she shoved me away and we lay still—tired, breathless, numb.

I couldn’t tell you how long it took to get her there.

Wake did love her wars of attrition.

In case you were wondering about the handcuffs and the escape pod, we decided to send you off in style. The strangeness of the scene, we figured, would lead you down some other road of speculation.

To be fair, we were right; it would’ve taken a crew-and-a-half to subdue you with those flimsy shackles, and you would assume yourself outsmarted far before complicit—more than enough to cover our tracks.

She hadn’t mentioned, however, that she’d blow the outpost.

How foolish of me, to emerge from that storeroom with juvenile, post-coital pride, as if I’d won for us both, as if I’d walk away with no consequence beyond a bit of future remorse to stifle in silence. 

As it turned out, that assumption had been wrong, twofold; I struggled to make myself care at all, aside from the initial embarrassment.

You stared at the faint orange cloud on the planet’s surface, knuckles white, and clutched at the black rift in your gut; I watched the wreckage, disembodied, and retraced the course of our encounter, fixated on the possibilities of the next.

Slaps on the wrist, for us both, like children—

The loss of the bunker marked our first tangible failure, with scorched dust and rent titanium as evidence. We couldn’t blame this one on clever tactics or a quick escape; we’d cornered her in our territory but returned home, down one stronghold and not a single head on a platter.

John was disappointed.

His suggestion that you _needed a break_ might have cut you worse than Wake ever had.

But why, Gideon, did it matter to you?

How could he have possibly deserved your loyalty?

Had you not spent the centuries before her stagnant, for him? Had you not held your breath, patient, mind dulled by empty years at his behest, for nothing? Had you not grown sick of John’s deluded perceptions of us, of his own family, as pawns?

He neglected his fists and gestures like limp, atrophied limbs. And now—another gap, another void, another wasted stretch of time prescribed to us as therapy because one blemish on your record was enough to spark his concern, to arouse his masturbatory urge to play Daddy and pretend, for his ego, that he gave a damn about our wellbeing.

Benevolent God, my ass. That bastard held the universe at his disposal and hoarded it, left his precious saints hungry.

Worse yet, he still held you under his sway, convinced that you’d disgrace me to tell him _no_.

Well, Gid, take this as an amendment to that thought, in the event that my opinions on John come into question again:

 _Fuck_ John, Gideon.

Fuck him. 


	7. Chapter 7

Twenty years before he sent you after her again.

Ten before we saw her next.

Politics, this time:

Awake and her officers docked their ships on the Erebos, thirteen rebels in the lion’s den, so to speak. They outmatched us five, sad Lyctors, both in style and morale, unperturbed in our presence. I don’t blame them; while Augustine and Mercymorn bickered over semantics and Cytherea honed her thousand-yard stare, the Commander, long-haired and handsome, waged verbal warfare against God. She struck dangerous chords for our siblings, too, at that table, though they hid it to the best of their abilities.

Negotiations stalled, and we faced cyclical months of threats and grievances. Typical John was content to steeple his fingers and tread water ad nauseum, but Wake had armed herself with sufficient patience.

You stood guard through the talks, spear poised to discourage violence, and dodged the knowledge in her gaze. Endless questions for her, and ample opportunity to ask, but you shrunk at the thought of conversation divorced from battle. She wouldn’t have made it easy for you, either, had you tried.

For weeks, I did the same.

What excuse would I craft, without your heat and impulse to break the ice? What would I blame, other than my own selfishness, if I approached her?

She’d gained a host of new scars in her decade and wore them with pride, worthy of a portrait. She offered them for observation, the night my reservations withered.

Thus began another habit.

I resumed my theft of your hours with better practice and new rules:

Always her ship, and never ours, in case we required a quick escape, or an excuse; easier to explain an act of espionage from John’s sentry. Always during her watch, and never any longer, though we pushed that limit against our judgment, grew reluctant to part. Always hands, always mouths, always some unspoken boundary, until—

Well.

Something changed, Giddy. Something caved.

Grudges and rivalries fester in isolation but find challenge beneath the light of familiarity, and sometimes, they shrivel and die.

The conflict remained, as did the grief, as did the pity, but the animosity that once drove our affair did not survive her stay.

Our ire stretched and weakened in the presence of routine, those nights she mounted our lap and rode our palm and sunk her teeth into our shoulder; those minutes, those hours spent enthralled by friction; and it further waned through learned precision. I pinned her intricacies, memorized needs, made her whine at my leisure, head between her legs and fingers curled.

Like clockwork, I witnessed her, unarmed and uncoiled—

How she arched, ephemeral, and fell solid to her mattress; how she softened and sharpened and cloaked her adoration with her clever tongue. Stripped of regalia and rage, she was vulnerable flesh; she was warm, glistening skin bound to muscle and bone; she was a cipher to decode, a flame to stoke, and beneath her violent surface, she simmered with wit and charm.

No treaties were signed during those tedious months, but we hurtled through them together, entertained in secret, a sorry approximation of lovers.

She ended the hatred in its entirety, one night, with dark, rich laughter and lips at our nape. She knelt behind us, pressed our face into her pillow, leaned over our back, kissed our shoulders. All my talk of conquest, and I’d become easy prey, lost my hesitation to her strong, confident touch.

She wanted me to beg. I needed to be hers. I gave her what she wanted.

She gripped our hips and rocked into us—sublimely tender and ruthlessly slow—and I closed your eyes and melted; I surrendered for you both.

Truth be told, the shame never registered to the extent that I deserved.

More salacious than the sex was the exchange that followed, after we’d extricated, rolled onto our sides, and rid ourselves of the evidence, save for residual throb. We lay naked in her bed well past the end of her watch, your arm draped over her torso, hers bent behind her head, our eyes locked. I tilted the tip of a cigarette into her lighter, and we swapped smoke and meandered through conversation, lamented circumstance, cursed John’s name.

Here was the depth of my treachery, in stories shared under artificial moonlight.

She offered anecdotes about her turbulent adolescence, in and out of cuffs until she learned to direct her fire; tales of old flames who’d betrayed her, officers who’d never left, dear friends who’d died.

I told her about you and about the early days, in turn, about how we became what we were. From her perspective, she never quite grasped the nature of our arrangement, the reasons behind my consent to fuel your ascension, but I humanized you to her all the same. I spoke of your old mannerisms, of your rare expressions of mirth, and of your loyal heart.

Nothing I’d revealed had troubled her more, however, than the confirmation that you longed for her, too; that for you, she’d become a source of purpose—she’d become your lighthouse, hostile but infinitely bright.

Oh, Gideon, how quickly she turned; she sparked her righteous anger on our behalf, for the first time, settled herself between our legs and claimed us again. We were someone else’s war crime, someone else’s fault, and she drove her fury, for him, into us.

Had the option been presented, I would have moved galaxies, I would have disrupted space and time to lie side by side by side, two worn souls and our transient star.

Minutes into the gentle aftermath of our second collapse, Wake—with her head on our chest, hair soaked with sweat, hand in ours—broke me with a question, and I discovered in myself a fragility I’d neglected. 

How much?

How much of me was left?

All this time, I’d clutched onto that fistful of details—the spent ash, the raw knuckles, the burnt rubber, the sharp eyes and guile and tact—as if they were my personhood, kept whole, surgically removed from my body and deposited somewhere in your conscience.

Fantasy, on my part; they were little more than loose grains of sand, unstructured and unarranged if not for the silent desperation that strengthened my grip.

I was a ghost, an aberration, a revenant, an urge, a memory, pretending to be human, and I hadn’t yet had my fill.

In her arms, I chose to keep playing.

She met me halfway, wise enough to know without the explanation. 

Gideon, if you noticed, in the terminal weeks of those roundtable pissing matches, a different wrinkle in her brow and a different shape to her stare that you attributed to disgust, understand that it was sympathy, and this was why. You and I were a walking tragedy, and from that moment onward, we’d become hers to mourn. 


	8. Chapter 8

Here’s a thought for your next morning tea:

_Immortality cheapens time._

If, for whatever reason, I were asked to identify the center of the cruelty of Lyctorhood—I’ve pondered this at length over the course of my career— _that_ would be my answer: _temporal depreciation_.

Year after year after year, you accumulate time until time becomes expendable nonsense, and you’ll waste it on anything that teases respite; you’ll give it up to a tic, to an asinine tally, to a recollection of a fractional curve of a silhouette because you can’t get rid of it fast enough. And perhaps the most insidious twist of the knife is that you don’t notice how valueless it’s become until you bind yourself to something, to _someone_ , who clings to it as precious gold and risks it anyway, dauntless and drunk on spite.

No mortal—not even she, try as she might—obsesses like a Lyctor, Gideon, because every last one of them lacks the currency to spare.

Our Commander was a busy woman. Her time was expensive. She couldn’t afford to pine for another decade, in our absence; she had an arsenal to purchase.

And what an investment she’d made, worthy of a proper Cohort fleet.

John had described the attack on the Edenite station as an act of self-preservation; they’d grown too powerful for their own good, under her leadership. He left it to us to humble them.

Wake, a few years shy of her half-century and further hardened, led a damn impressive force, kept us on our toes. The separation had sobered her, a bit, in the sense that her inebriation had shifted focus—away from the leisure and the sex and the ghost of a romance that we’d shared and back to the screech and burn of choreographed destruction. Those great enemy ships, hundreds in number, spread themselves out in a wall of lights and steel particulate against black, star-pocked space, and they converged on us as clusters of synthetic asteroids, faked a charge and launched their missiles.

Thousands of necromancers and their cavaliers, blown to bloody dust within their ships; limbs and torsos and faces split by gnarled metal and vaporized in the seconds that followed; scores of cruisers and destroyers reduced to scrap in instantaneous bursts.

Was I offended?

Maybe.

Coming from her, the warheads were nothing short of a rejection—a cold, impersonal choice of weaponry. Herald scraps in the debris, a weak acknowledgement of our presence. She’d already stung you and me both.

No matter. Necromancers, as carrion beetles in human bodies, played dirty by nature, and thanergy bloomed just as dark and wild on either side. The carnage would’ve turned in Cohort favor one way or another, with or without your command, and thus, no one blinked an eye when you transferred leadership to seek her on your own. Either you’d secure an early victory, or the drudgery would persist, molasses-paced, for the glory.

I applaud your decision, of course. Our girl’s memory deserved a good and thorough jogging before she reaped the luxury of forgetfulness.

Took you a while to reach her.

Rebellion soldiers fired at you with Herald rounds in the command ship, and you stained the halls brilliant red, crystallized your blood and theirs and repurposed it as shrapnel. Spear and rapier pierced and ended the luckier amongst their ranks, though the gruesomeness of any of their deaths was a matter of economy and nothing more.

The excitement in your gut skewed towards curiosity as you closed on her position. You would not kill her here. Obvious, perhaps, but significant, as for once, you’d welcomed the inevitable failure-by-trance. You’d set a trap with a lure to tempt us all.

You two performed your scuffle in the control room, a reproduction of an old play, shot for shot and blow for blow, backlit by the array of communications panels against the wall. You handled the pistol, first—vaulted over the central display table, your hand rejected by its touch sensors, and kicked it from her grasp—but she leveraged your momentum, caught you in the solar plexus with her fist, slammed your face into her knee. In the recoil, you backed into the edge. A hot stream ran from your nose, and your vision swam, but you trapped her right forearm before another hook landed.

She reached for the holster at her belt, but you’d learned your lesson; you pivoted one-eighty, her arm in tow, and dragged her, face-first, over the console behind you. She abandoned the knife to catch herself, fingers splayed on the screen. Five indicators flashed green under her prints, and a projection of the battlefield rose from the surface, blemished by her shadow.

Holographic chaos— 

Ship markers disappeared in real-time. Edenite forces dwindled. Voices crackled over the comms and drowned in harsh static.

No quips or smug assertions for us, from her, only a struggle for dominance and a virulent hiss: “ _Gideon_.”

You held her flush against the blue-lit display, one wrist locked and the curve of her skull beneath your palm, a quiet threat.

( _Give it up, Commander._ )

Through the windows at your back, a red-orange glow crept into the room.

She kicked your ankle, hard, and snapped, “Take it from my corpse.”

Though it brought you little joy, you lifted, rammed her head forward, and knocked a groan out of her to match your own. She strained under your hand, turned her face, spat blood. You leaned over her. She glared at us with one eye narrowed and the other shut, a disdain we hadn’t seen in a long time.

Was it for you? For me? Or for memory itself?

The ship lurched.

You both lost balance as the delayed remnants of an explosion pummeled the hull. Wake slid from the table, onto her right side. You stumbled ass-first into a steering yoke but couldn’t afford the investigation, so you dove after her, instead. On the floor, another cycle began: a crawled pursuit to the far wall and a scramble for the gun, for the knife, for each other’s limbs, until—

Triumph.

Awkward and staggered, you rose and brought her to her feet by the dark, high collar of her uniform and pushed her up against the glass panel. She held your wrists tight, although your grip had lessened in intensity after she’d acquiesced. The ship, thrown off its course, arced slowly in involuntary retreat. Beyond the window, scorched ship parts flew by at various velocities and framed the quickened rise and fall of her shoulders in debris and distant stars.

She’d broken your nose, and you’d likely concussed her, but there, in the language of injury, was a return to a home. A shame you’d both entered through separate doors.

( _Commander Awake Remembrance of These—_ )

“Treacherous Saint of Duty, Gideon.”

You studied the lines of her face—those that hadn’t been there when you’d encountered her last, those that indicated a smile you’d hardly witnessed—and she searched our eyes, tried her best to obfuscate the weariness in her own.

We knew that look intimately; we’d shot it at each other countless times.

( _Whatever it is, give it up. The fight is already over._ )

She, however, was unfamiliar with your softness, hadn’t received that tone from you as I had. She misunderstood. “The fight is over when His heart stops, lich,” she said. “It stops when all of you writhe and burn in hell. My death at your hands would be a temporary setback”—her death at our hands would stamp their fire to ash—“and if you have even an ounce of loyalty left in you, you would put an end to this game yourself.”

She may as well have called my name.

I think, somehow, you knew this—knew that she’d addressed us both, as a couple—and compartmentalized the information, like you’d done at the bunker, torn between your need for answers and the horror they might hold.

I took the bait, regardless. 

What was it you said, before I breached?

( _I will._ )

. . .

_Had I mentioned that I’d missed her?_

_“What he meant to say”—I released her collar and cradled her face, thumbs to her cheekbones, fingertips in the loose curls by her ears—"was ‘let it go,’ love. Give up the fight, for now. Let your spirit rest.”_

_Her jaw tightened under my touch, and she squinted, deliberate in her overcompensation. Dregs of our peaceful era; the image of your rightful eyes threatened to dull her stare._

_“Pyrrha, no,” she said. She pried your hands away, swatted them back at me as if to return me with them whence I’d come. “_ No _. Not this again. I don’t have the patience.”_

_I took this in stride; I stepped back, and I wiped the blood from your lips and chin, pinched the bridge of your nose, assessed the damage. She’d done worse._

_“Fortunately,” I said, ”we built our relationship on impulse and not patience. Got any of_ that _for me?”_

_She snorted, mirthless. “Our relationship was an open sore, at best”—untrue—“and you made sure of that yourself, years ago. You had your chance, and you chose your side, and it’s you who hasn’t let go. Let it die, Pyrrha! Let it rot, as it should.”_

_“Don’t trivialize the past, Commander. There are cleaner ways to kill God—I’d given you options back then, and my options still stand—but you set your heart on genocide. I chose basic decency.”_

_She paused. An icy silence passed between us, broken only by the blip of extant units vanishing from the map. That beautiful chin shifted in the rise of her palpable annoyance._

_Voice low and raspy and grave, she recited old words, as though they’d accrue new meaning: “No seeds; no fruit; no replacements.” Cheap mantra, worth more to her than love. I’d hoped I’d heard the last of it._

_One-by-one, Wake cracked her knuckles, pressed those ten capable fingers into her palms, and rolled her neck and shoulders—slow and graceful, panther-like—as she stepped forward from the glass. Fifty-fifty chance whether or not she’d strike me, judging by the journey of her irises over our neck and chest. I adjusted my stance an inch, concerned for our body._

_Beneath us, the floor rumbled, the translation of some impact through the ship’s metal carcass and up our boots. I imagined, for a second, the adamant swell of anger behind those calculating eyes as an extremity of that vibration, and Wake, herself, as an outcropping of a force, as a vessel for a torrid energy, bubbled over._

_Really, I was sentimental. She was pissed._

_The craft pitched again, and Wake seized her opportunity, lunged for our jugular with brutal intent. I did not permit this, but I allowed the series of jabs to our gut, after I’d halted her strike. Little victories had always mattered to her._

_Half-doubled over her fist, I returned us to where we’d started, her back against the plex, with a firm hand low on her abdomen. The empty holsters at her waist clacked together upon contact._

_Nostrils flared, she seethed, and she spat, “I should have castrated you as you twitched in my hands, bitch.”_

_She wouldn’t have had the heart._

_“Wake, dear, I have not come here to roleplay ‘adversary’ with you. I’ve come to repay a debt.” I reached for her wrist, but she insisted on her game of keep away, so I held her sides, instead, and turned her into the glass. “Look. Look!” I steadied her with a hand between her shoulder blades, felt her tense at tenderness._

_And together, we watched._

_Demolished ships, suspended in space; Cohort and Edenite casualties as nondescript particle clouds; escape pods floating listlessly, their oxygen seals ruptured by jagged shards, their inhabitants surely dead. The horrid, serene vista of a battlefield, inert, framed by her fists and her forearms._

_Despite herself, she trembled in rage and fear—fear that I’d offered comfort and not violence, fear of my words and my observations. I stood behind her as an anchor, solid and still, and leaned softly into the bound firestorm of her hair._

_“This terrifies you,” I insisted. “This devours you whole. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that it doesn’t. I know because I’ve been here before, as the maker and observer of many a wasteland.” Forehead against the panel, she depressurized, exhaled long and hard, and I breathed in the nostalgic scent of her sweat and drew closer, revisited the curves of her biceps through touch. “I’ve known the same anguish. I’ve known the same fatigue. The same heat that licks its way to your surface and singes enemy and ally and lover alike, I have known, and it is precisely that knowledge that binds us in spirit.”_

_Without challenge or deflection, she turned her cheek into the plex, and she watched our hand as it traveled the length of her arm and covered her clenched fist with its mass. She opened her palms, laid them flush, spread her fingers for ours to enter the gaps and curl over them. Memories. I kissed her ear, and she held her lips together and sighed through her nose._

_“Let it go, love.” The backs of her shoulders uncoiled against our chest. “Share it with me.”_

_She closed her eyes, swore, and consented with action; she dragged our right hands, locked tight, between her body and the window, turned them toward her, unfastened her buckle with the other while I let her hair down. I held that hand as it slipped under her clothing, whispered encouragement and temptation both, and stiffened against her lower back as she writhed._

_“How do we make you feel, me and my Gideon?”_

_“Sick. Compromised.” She answered me between sharp, shallow breaths, every confession a delicate cut. “Alive.” Five idle fingers rested on our cheek and twitched as two of ours entered her, slow and unyielding in rhythm. Her last word came heavy, labored: “Wounded_."

_I pulled back, adjusted her hips, gripped two waistbands at once, and said, “Let me offer you a numbing agent.”_

_“Yes.” She groaned it like an admission of defeat._

_Bare to her thighs, she braced with a forearm and replaced our digits with hers._

_“Good girl, Wakes.”_

_I dealt with our zipper._

_“Fuck y—"_

_Infinite, my fondness for those habits of hers. I buried us deep in the slick, familiar heat of her cunt, and she surrendered to speechlessness under my guidance. My darling Commander, disheveled, unwound; I could do nothing but lavish her with filthy adorations and spoil her the way she preferred from me: loving, relentless, rough._

_She’d worked so hard, worked herself raw in the name of her cause, and I’d missed her twice for every bead of sweat she’d shed in her toils. How quickly those burdens fell away. I watched those gorgeous arms flex beneath her jacket and hold her up against my force, and I gave myself to her until the wreckage fell out of mind, until nothing remained but the asymmetry of our voices, reunited._

_Had she not stopped me, I would have ruined us._

_After all those years, she knew us well, recognized the change in our tenor and the tightening of our grip. At the edge of climax, she growled at me, grounded me instantly:_

_“Pyrrha, no.”_

_Harsh, agonizing separation; I pulsed into our fist and onto the floor, and every inch of our body shook for the horror—shook for the dream—of what I’d almost done. We would never be allowed—she nor you nor I—this domestic fantasy that’d spurred my recklessness. We would never cauterize this open sore upon which we’d cultivated our love._

_It was I who’d needed to remember._

_If I’d repaid a debt in that control room, I’d gained another in its place just as easily._

_By her request, I knelt and placed myself at her mercy, head in her hands. Easier this way, to not speak, to not endure derision or reassurance or verbalized pity. I leaned my sorrow into her stomach, and I kissed my tears into the faint scar where we’d torn her side. Whatever emotion colored her eyes, I cared not to discover. I’d learned to read her silence long ago._

_Our routine, our cipher, built across decades—_

_This was all I needed, and this was what she gave me._


	9. Chapter 9

I must admit, I’ve not been entirely honest in the framing of these recollections—in this draft of my confession, as I’d described it earlier.

Yes, everything I’ve told you is real, and yes, I long to share these stories with you, in honor of our promise, but truthfully, I’ve been using them as a distraction.

For myself.

I am worried, Gideon.

I’ve lived inside you long enough to recognize anomalies in your murky ocean of a conscience, and ever since you found me out and pulled me under, I have yet to emerge in that cave behind your eyes. I’m afraid you’re on the verge of boiling, and I’m reminded of the days of panic, after Canaan House. As far as alarms go, this one is rather loud.

I could go on to list my theories on the situation, on what might happen, but none of them are pleasant, and for the sake of my own sanity, I’ve decided to trudge onward to the end, tucked inside this nebulous pocket of yours.

One last date with our girl.

Grant me a little more time here, love.

To place the terror of it behind us, I’ll begin with the end—with that final, disjointed sequence of memories:

Your grip on our tether; your confident, skillful parry; a shallow dip, at first, and then, your scream—that awful scream, with all of your chest—followed by my long, rapid declension into this dark, unfamiliar space. 

I wouldn’t trust my estimate of the time elapsed since then. Given the length of this exposé, I’d guess hours, but we both know how this works, from experience.

Could’ve been a blink. Could’ve been a lifetime.

Let’s assume, at the very least, that the scene is still fresh and recall our enjoyment of it, together.

Up through the River with you, and back to the realm of Dominicus. I’d be remiss not to mention the poetics of the territory—another threshold crossed, here, in the star system that’d platformed our initial leap.

From the second John had given you the word to the moment of your inelegant crash into the side of her vessel, your fingers itched for her flesh, and your heart burned for answers.

Finally, you’d get them.

Was it masochistic of me to be proud?

I, myself, vibrated with anticipation, so thrilled to cross her path mere months after the previous battle.

Arrogant firebrands, you and I, negligent of that cold, grim intuition, on our way to douse one another.

For what it’s worth, this dance on her ship may have been your finest yet. The chase you gave each other, room by room on that shuttle of hers, reminiscent of our past entanglements—reminiscent of _our_ past entanglements—the two of you imitating sex through combat more so than ever, which, frankly, I’d consider an achievement, at this point.

‘ _Show me your fists, woman’_?

 _Gideon_ , you dirty dog.

Shall I tell you what I would have done to you if you’d used a line like that on me?

I suspect you have an idea.

This encounter was not a war, but a house call, defined by an undercurrent of ease. Neither of you fought with the fear of death, much less with the intent to kill; you toiled in intimate silence and shared each other’s air—her claws to your skin, her legs tangled with your arms as they sought purchase, your fingers in her hair to drag her down.

Don’t think I didn’t catch the smiles on your faces—those bloodstained grins and incandescent eyes.

My handsome couple.

By the time I intervened, you’d already had her on her knees, the door behind her ripped clean off its hinges, her throat clutched for your love of drama. I am convinced that her course of action would’ve been the same for whichever of us had remained there, with our shadow cast over her body, and perhaps I should have stayed put and tested that hypothesis. Alas, I am nothing if not consistent.

She gave me a proper greeting, position unchanged, and we proceeded as usual—our coda to your hurricane through her ship. You’d already wrecked the bulk of it; why not tear through her bedroom, too, in the interest of completion?

Those four, cramped walls, defiant of their own austerity, had housed eons’ more excitement and activity for me than every combined inch of the Mithraeum’s sprawl. I’d be foolish not to wring the luxury of my return for all its value. 

Wise of her to treat my mood with skepticism, considering the effect of wistfulness on my self-control; she bound our arms to our sides, laid our body on her floor, and straddled our waist, intent on driving me to frustration.

Fun, despite the unfortunate timing.

As she worked her magic on our body, you crept back to consciousness through a backdoor, and I couldn’t parse the headache until it was too late, and you’d already found and grasped the reins. Her hips still bucked and fingers still dug into our chest as you pulled your veil over my vision, and I faded to the sight of her amusement and pleasure with a word of caution half-formed and promptly stifled.

That beautiful, chiseled face of hers, your firm, familiar grip, and a sudden, merciless darkness.

And that was that.

You’d caught me, and you’d touched me for the first time in ten thousand years.

How messy the circumstance, and how hilariously on-brand.

In all of our strange entanglements, and in all of our questionable collisions, as a triad, let this be named the apotheosis of the absurdity of our affair:

There must have been an interval of time—between my blackout and your total reemergence, however long that may have been—during which Commander Wake—the proud, charismatic leader of the faction we’d been sent to snuff—probably believed she’d fucked us unconscious.

Perhaps this is naively optimistic of me, but in the event that the three of us end up in some hellish afterlife, stuck helplessly together as we currently are, promise me, Giddy, that neither you nor I will ever let her live it down.


	10. Chapter 10

Oh, Gideon, what more can I say, in this cruel blindness, in this unending deafness?

My chaos has caught up with me.

I can imagine the confusion, the shock, the betrayal that must’ve gripped you in your waking hour; the duplicity of knowledge—satisfaction and horror at once, release followed by regret.

I hope I never have to hear you scream again, and I hope, more than anything, that I’ll never be the cause, because I should have been your shield, and I should have been your armor.

Darling, I don’t know what will become of us, now that you know the truth.

Have I sent us both across the River, in my hunger?

Is this wound fatal, or will there be another myriad’s worth of sins to confess when we finally meet again? 

No matter, no matter—

In the event that I return to awareness—if I resurface behind those old, green eyes that I’d once considered my own—I will be still, and I will be patient, as I’d agreed to be, as your cavalier. I’ve had my fill. I’ve played my game, and I’ve singed the tips of both our fingers in the process.

We were meant to be counterparts. We were meant to hold each other up, and we’d crumbled under our own, awkward weight, far too intense for one body to bear. It’s a shame we hadn’t realized this earlier, before we’d signed up to throw ourselves away. She could never have shouldered us both.

Gideon, _Gideon—_

Let me offer you my final word, as I remain at your mercy:

I love you, and I’m sorry, and I can only pray into the darkness of this godforsaken universe that someday, we can fix ourselves and lighten the tragedy of our existence.

But until that day, my Gideon, my dutiful necromancer dearest—

 _One flesh, one end_. I will wait for you in silence, and I hope you’ll wait for me.

You and I know well the embrace of loneliness, don’t we, dear? 


	11. Epilogue

_All of that fire and ferocity, yet she offers him silence, now, at the worst of times, her dark eyes grave and unblinking and her lips pressed tight._

_“How long?” He repeats his question with a break in his voice that he hasn’t heard, himself, for as long as his infinite memory stretches back._

_“Twenty years.”_

_This does not surprise him._

_Surprise might have lessened the sting. Surprise might have made him laugh. Surely, this is funny in some other timeline—Gideon, Saint of Duty, half-naked on his haunches in his enemy’s bedroom._

_She would’ve laughed._

_Was she laughing?_

_She’d set it up and abandoned the punchline._

_Best not to think about it. Best not to—_

_“And do you love her?”_

_She lets that neglected cigarette dangle from her fingers, lets his hoarseness hang in the air as if they have all of infinity to dawdle, and he counts the seconds between his final word and her answer, swears a silent oath that if she doesn’t respond right now, he’ll have to—_

_“Yes, I—yes.”_

_Funny how adversary turns ally._

_She would’ve laug—_

_“Then help me. Now.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!


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